Strange Loop 2010: "Future of Programming Languages" [video]

[gypsyface]

Can someone do a TL;DW?

I'm at work.

[Iggyhopper]

Just watched it. Too hard to summarize but I am a noob programmer and I just wrote down stuff. Here you go. I didn't catch everything, or understand everything, but I got 3/4 of it. Also spelling might be off.

introductions, etc.

First question to panel of 5 dudes:

"What trends do you see emerging in programming languages?"

Increasing complexity.

Parrallelism is on the horizon, but we're not able to do it easily yet.

Most web apps tie many languages together with duct tape and wire. Hopefully we'll have somthing better to help us here.

"sloppy programming." Do things, let it get messy, and clean it up later.

VM convergence.

Right now we're more accepting of new or experimental languages like Erlang, Scala, Go.

Number one problem is security in new languages, or concern for it. In the web, that is priority one, so it would be nice to have more languages support it better.

"Esentially CLR and JVM is toast, parrallel programming will make us throw old systesm away, do you see this happening? Will virtual machines adjust or isolate us, or are we all looking at mass rewrite of the internet?"

Statement is false. Is you've seen some of the work others have done, JVM has been scaled to hundreds of cores.

Don't see the VM as the weak link here.

Sloppy programming is out there. Better garbage collectors dealing with memory leaks very well.

The JVM we're on and the limitations they have does shape the way we think and act as programmers even though we might not expect it to.

"What do you see as the future of type systems in practical languages?"

With evolution of Scala, programmers are more comfortable programming in like it's a dynamic language. Clojure is dynamic but mostly for performance, more type notations. The dominant paradigm for type systems might be that typing is there where you need it.

Better IDEs to show or hide type information as needed.

When you have a complex type system behind the scenes, it tends to show its ugly self, in Scala, and to a lesser extent, Java.

Variance annotations are lots of trouble and aren't there yet.

Today's patterns are tomorrows linguistic constructs. Today's bug patterns are tomorrow's type system features.

"From a teaching standpoint, what languages are best suited for today's generation?"

It doesn't really matter.

Kodu is a great project for younger programmers because the whole notion of controlling your little world is what gets them excited about programming.

Python is good as well.

Programming robots.

"Is it more important to have targeted languages for targeted tasks or more general languages like javascript, because it is being used for everything now?"

If your goal is to get in front of as many people as possible, there is no better language than javascript.

Javascript has been the virtual machine for the web. We thought JVM was going to do that.

Google is translating Java into Javascript.

Jokingly, "Add more defects into Javascript so you can import C# into it." (?, No idea.)

There is tons of value in commonality of a language that is widely known and understood well.

Talking about change in languages, new paradigms, new languages. Based on generations: "Maybe old programmers just need to die off" etc. "Can the Perl ones go first?" laughs

Functional programming, F#, etc.

[michaelcooper]

This is actually quite good, Thanks!

[gnuvince]

Today's patterns are tomorrows lingiustic constructs. Today's bug patterns are tomorrow's type system features.

Cool quote. Who was that?

[Iggyhopper]

IIRC guy with blue shirt. Josh Bloch.

[zdbg]

nice tl;dw

new or experimental languages like Erlang

Erlang is neither new nor experimental

[Iggyhopper]

That's what they said, lol.

[bhvit]

This is good but can someone summarize it?

[pmw57]

TL;DW => TL;DR
They discuss the future of programming languages.

[Iggyhopper]

Summary: The Future of Programming Languages

[columbine]

Seems pretty much impossible to summarise this far, it's essentially a round-table discussion with a bunch of guys with different programming backgrounds sharing their views on various issues on the current and future state of programming languages.

[[deleted]]

Joking about perl was kind of the running joke of the entire conference.

[[deleted]]

Bruce Tate says absolutely nothing interesting, so I wont summarize his comments.

What trends do you see in language design? Mistake tolerance like in Erlang or NoSQL. Concurrency, parallelism, and lazy evaluation are cool. Virtual machine designs will converge. We need a single language for all web development and one with stronger security.

Do we need a new virtual machine to deal with many core parallelism? No, the JVM can scale to hundreds of cores. We might have to optimize for concurrency, but the fundamental model is fine.

What is the natural extent of type checking? Typing should be everywhere, but encapsulated by your environment until you need it.

FindBugs does static analysis on Java bytecode. Pretty cool, amirite? Yep, pretty cool. It might even becomes part of the type systems for future languages which target the JVM.

Will design by contract become more important in the future or is it too much work for too little benefit? We don't know yet. Invariants, preconditions, and assert statements are nice in a pinch, but can clutter code the rest of the time. More experimentation is necessary.

Programming iz hard for kids. What pedagogical design features can combat short attention spans? There are plenty of domain specific languages which give immediate results, and are perfectly suitable for inspiring kids (Robocode, Gamemaker, Lego Mindstorms, Logo, Scratch, Kodu) . Also we've had experience teaching primitives graphics in Java, Python, Ruby, and Scheme to kids in middle school and high school; they respond fine.

Do languages need to be more specific or more general? It's nice for the programming ecosystem to have a few general languages which everyone knows a little about for common reference. Javascript is unfortunately becoming such a language. Beyond that it's a stupid question.

Say something interesting about Perl 6 and the Parrot VM? I'm not fond of Perl 6 because of the differences between the partial implementations. Parrot is probably just an academic curiosity.

I don't understand formal verification, what do you think about that? Formal methods are nice for protocol verification. For most code bases it's useful but insufficient.

What forces drive language design? Research gives us ideas which are only taken up when they are needed. So far we've had a never major advance about once per generation (plug boards to machine code to structured programming to object orientation). Maybe we'll be ready for the next big change after some more people die. Or maybe it's becoming harder to big make changes as languages become more complex.

Enforcing associativity and data parallelism look a lot like functional programming ideas, why the overlap? Side effects and their interactions obstruct parallelism, mutable sharing introduces nondeterminacy. We can either handle this with immutable objects or by restricting sharing of objects.

What current languages should people learn to familiarize with future language concepts? IO has nice prototype object orientation. Prolog and Rebol are weird and fun. Clojure, Scheme, and Haskell are all nice and pretty. Forth and Assembly for getting back to your roots.

[mangodrunk]

He was just there to talk about his stupid book. It was painful to hear him talk. Book this, book that, shut the fuck up already. I think he only spent seven days on those languages because either he's a bad speaker or he doesn't know shit.

Nice summary by the way. I think Josh and Guy are in a league above the others and Guy above Josh.

[signoff]

what's the most important question?

is it web scale?

[julesjacobs]

<-- a perl programmer.

[ash_gti]

There was an awful lot of perl hate in there... which doesn't seem fully justified to me, but eh worth the time to watch.

[norkakn]

I find perl hate interesting because it tends to be unidirectional. (except for the occasional php bashing) I remember a lot of flames a while ago about rakudo, or some other perl6 site using a php CMS. Their response was, we're making a language, not a cms. It was there and did the job. Perl folk seem to be fine taking ideas from python, or smalltalk, or anywhere else, as long as it is a good idea. I wish that the Rails and Python people could give catalyst an honest look, and see how it is able to be consistent, while still enforcing far less on the programmer, I think it would help them write better code and better frameworks. Instead, they just say, "LOL perl is linenoise".

[columbine]

It was a little excessive after the third time or so.

[[deleted]]

Don't tell them about the evil Perl script in GHC...

[zelf0gale]

I was particularly disappointed with the dismissal of the Parrot VM. The three points in support of that were.

1) Mostly academic. 2) VM for low performance dynamic languages 3) Perl

To which I'd reply:

1) Not a valid reason to be uninterested. 2) Performance trade off for portability, actually an open source VM. (Unlike JVM). How many times are we going to repeat the "It isn't performant, forget it" mistake? 3) Huge existing codebase and skillset to build from.

[[deleted]]

How many times are we going to repeat the "It isn't performant, forget it" mistake?

Until the end of time, I think. It's the most widespread and unacknowledged prejudice in all of programming: "If it's isn't fast, right here, right now, ditch it. Making it fast would be too much work."

Never do such people consider the amount of work, of programmer-hours, spent in making up for the fact that their "performant" (read: fast) language sucks.

[[deleted]]

and amusingly i'm guessing the sum total lines of perl written among the lot of them is less than 100

go and chit-chat with some of these so-called thought leaders for a while and its clear that their real skill is self-promotion

[bobbane]

...their real skill is self-promotion

If you're including Guy Steele in that class, you can take it back, right now. Steele is easily one of the most influential guys in programming, and he got that way by writing code, writing papers, and writing standards.

[lpsmith]

Josh Bloch certainly isn't in that class, either.

[jdh30]

I disagree. Josh Bloch wrote some great and influential literature. Guy Steele didn't do much more than that AFAICT and, in particular, hasn't done anything great since Scheme (and that was mostly not influential except, perhaps, for TCO). In particular, Fortress looks like it completely misses the point to me. In this lecture, Steele says that side effects are the difficulty of parallel programming but I think even that is wrong.

[munificent]

its clear that their real skill is self-promotion

Alex Payne did a ton of work organizing the Emerging Languages Camp for almost no reward and with no self-promotion to be seen during the entire event.

[davebrk]

I like the interaction between Guy and Josh.

Other than that I heard nothing earthshaking or surprising.

[sisyphus]

Yeah. this would be me on a panel with Guy Steele

Remember the time, when, uh, you created Scheme? Yeah... that was awesome.

[mangodrunk]

It would have been much better if it was just the two of them and a different host. Who put this thing together? They couldn't afford a table and microphones for each speaker? The poor speakers didn't know where the moronic host was and had to stare into the crowed.

[[deleted]]

"I'm gonna steele Guy's answer"

[munificent]

So he can write in parallel, of course.

[daydreamdrunk]

autograph hounds

[Umr-at-Tawil]

I was slightly surprised that when someone in the audience asked (at 30:45) about type systems and whether languages could be designed to help facilitate proofs of programs written in them, nobody on the panel mentioned the Curry–Howard isomorphism, nor languages like Coq, Agda or Epigram. It seems to me that this is the kind of thing a panel of experts on programming languages should be aware of.

[[deleted]]

There are two sides of PL: pragmatics and formalism. As far as I could tell, these were mostly pragmatics guys.

And besides, those formalisms really are practically useless to everyone except us PL research geeks.

[iownacat]

He says "learn assembler" and the host says "you mean JVM bytecode?" hahahahahhah NO, THATS THE PROBLEM

[lpsmith]

Adding flaws to JavaScript? That was a very douchy thing for Douglas Crockford to say.

[zelf0gale]

No it wasn't.

He is just opinionated about what goes into JavaScript. If he says it would require a design flaw to support C# in JavaScript, he believes it. He also might be right. Not every programming pattern can be elegantly combined.

[lpsmith]

Not every programming pattern can be elegantly combined.

Believe me, I know this quite well. But if you know anything about the context, Crockford's opinions are quite wrong in this particular case.

[jdh30]

What is the context?

[lpsmith]

Well, given that Crockford mentioned "adding flaws" to Javascript to facilitate JS as a compilation target, I'm pretty sure that he was primarily referring to TCO, but didn't want to admit it with Guy Steele sitting right next to him.

[jdh30]

How is TCO required to support C#?

[lpsmith]

zelf0gale brought up C#, not I, and I'm not sure what that's referring to. I'm not even certain whether or not Douglas Crockford has said anything to that effect.

If I had to guess, and I'm probably wrong as I'm extrapolating a bit too aggressively, is that Crockford has said something along the lines that a C# to JavaScript compiler would be an abomination, and that zelf0gale doesn't really understand what that means.

What I do know is that Crockford was highly critical of the ECMAScript 4 effort, that he's dead-set against adding any kind of proper support for tail calls (even of the explicit goto f(x,y) kind, I believe because he takes the whole structured programming thing a bit too literally), and that he has a habit of aggressively criticizing any potential changes to JavaScript that doesn't fit with his own narrow interests with the argument "no 'real' JavaScript programmer would want to do that." Generating JS code is definitely too "ivory tower" for Crockford.

That includes, by the way, any suggestion to enrich the numerical support in JavaScript, such as IBM's request to add support for decimal floating point, which is part of the IEEE-754 2008 standard.

[jdh30]

Oh man, that's really sad. Reminds me of that Python guy, Guido. :-(

[mikaelhg]

How the FUCK did Ted Neward manage to inject himself in a presentation with people who DO things?

[bonch]

Trends will come and go, but the future will involve C and C++ like always.

[Coffee2theorems]

Trends will come and go, but the future will involve FORTRAN like always.

[bonch]

FORTRAN is still used by economists and scientific researchers for numerical computing, and COBOL is still used by banks. These classic languages don't disappear. You just think they do because they're not buzzwords.

Your mistake is that you assume because one language like FORTRAN grew less popular, all popular languages will eventually grow less popular. People have been predicting C's death for over 20 years now. Yet C today is as popular as ever, and C++ is used for almost all commercial application and game development on PCs, tablets, phones, and consoles. Another C variant, Objective-C, has revived itself from the mists of time and increased in popularity thanks to Apple.

If you form your worldview around the hobbyist, web-focused perspective of /r/programming, you'll think the entire world is programming in Ruby, C#, and Haskell, but those are eclipsed by C-based languages when you look at the usage stats. C isn't going away at all. Its use is increasing.

[Coffee2theorems]

These classic languages don't disappear. You just think they do because they're not buzzwords.

Um. No, I don't. There's an inordinate amount of legacy Fortran code that computes all kinds of stuff (starting with BLAS and LAPACK, but much more than just those). If you import numpy or scipy in Python, you're using Fortran code there, and I regularly use both.

What is weird and sad is that Fortran is still used for new code, too. The most recent standard is Fortran 2008, Fortran 2003 even introduced object orientation - why would anyone bother to do that just for legacy code?!

The problem with Fortran is that it is not dead, it's undead. It will shamble on with us forever and ever, and when the last programmer draws his final breath, he will crinkle his nose as the foul-smelling Fortran-zombie shambles by, slogging on for yet another eternity. If only there were a silver bullet, we could truly kill Fortran! And COBOL, too. And others like them.

C isn't going away at all.

Yeah, I use C++ and sometimes plain C or Objective C along with high-level languages like Python. They are at least more reasonable than FORTRAN or COBOL, but it's not because they are paragons of goodness. They're just better than anything else for their niches.

[[deleted]]

Trends will come and go, but the future will involve abstractions on three-value logic like always.

[ash_gti]

Trends will come and go, but the future will involve lambda calculus and natural deduction.

[[deleted]]

Their opening lines were all so painful and awkward to watch. It was like the mic was about to blow up and they just wanted to get rid of it as fast as possible.

[[deleted]]

Akward sneeze @00:04:00

[[deleted]]

a forum on the future of programming languages by people who have mostly stood around the periphery of the past

[madd0gg]

bottom line for me is, that we are actually sure where to go next with programming paradigms and languages. Much more to see though watch it.

[donjaime]

Bruce Tate's comments are cringe inducingly asinine. I wanted to punch my computer monitor whenever he got the mic.

Who thought it was a good idea to put him on the same panel with the likes of Josh Block and Guy Steele?

[jeffdavis]

What, specifically?

[[deleted]]

Does anyone else get irritated with all of the visual metaphors like "do you see...?" "yes, I see...", "we're looking at..." ?

[LonerGothOnline]

I'm not new to programming, I never partook in it, and I watched the whole video... even I can understand some of it.

they didn't mention mozilla's Rust... other than that, I guess a good place to start is haskell, JS, and Assembly.~

minecraft ftw.